This invention relates to a system of data comparison for identifying the degree of similarity between objects.
Both manually and automatically operated devices have been known in the art for quite some time that are utilized for the comparison of a selected source piece of data with assembled target data. There are classic problems for which the goal is to match events and/or objects, for example police and fire investigations. Police detectives attempt to identify the person responsible for committing a crime. An arson investigator attempts to identify the person responsible for setting a fire, and so forth. In these instances, and others, the investigator must make the identification using information that is incomplete or inaccurate. Unfortunately, existing manual and automated systems have assumed that the information provided is correct. Further, they use only a very limited subset of the information available and typically search computer-based tables for exact matches. With existing systems, a single error or inaccuracy normally results in a failed search. Since the chance of including an error or inaccuracy increases as the percentage of the data used for the search increases, existing systems use only a very limited subset of the information available for the search. Since the assumption for this class of problems is incorrect to begin with, i.e. that the information is accurate, the results have been so poor that automated systems based upon these assumption are often ignored in favor of a time consuming, costly, tedious, and severely limited manual search. Thus, there is a need in the art for providing a system of data comparison that uses all the information available, including errors and inaccuracies, and provides a sorting and comparison of that data based on the degree of similarity with the source of the search. It, therefore, is an object of this invention to provide an improved system for data comparison that compares source objects with target objects in a database and provides an ordered list of target objects that most closely match the source object.